Takitoru: Exploring Teacher and Student Engagement – A Cook Island Perspective

In this paper I want to share my views about teacher and student engagement in the context of culturally responsive pedagogy. As educators, we always ask ourselves, ‘Do my students understand and really learn anything?’ To understand how teacher and student engagement is perceived from a cultural point of view, I adopted the metaphor of Takitoru. Takitoru is a weaving concept from a Cook Island perspective to explain how learning is socially constructed between the teacher and the learner. This presentation examines how a safe environment and learning responsively both play an important part in Pacific students learning in the classroom